In emergency services, access to the right information at the right time is critical. In most cases, relevant information is scattered through old and new systems, some electronic and others based on paper. Emergency services workers can find themselves in many different situations that require totally different information, and many different situations can arise during just one shift. A lot of these situations carry a life or death implication. Police services are one area of emergency services that can act as an example of what exists today.
Police officers increasingly have to search through complex and extensive information and knowledge sources. To find information, police officers have to know where the data sources are located and how to access them. A large amount of manual and cognitive effort is required to query all the relevant data sources, each with a different search interface, or to read the paper-based reports and glean the correct and relevant information from them.
Database technologies have been widely used to manage crime and police reports to provide faster and easier access for law enforcement personnel. One such example is the COPLINK Connect system. COPLINK aims to enable law enforcement agencies to search for information more effectively by providing a user-friendly interface that integrates data from various sources such as incident records, mug shots, and gang information. COPLINK uses co-occurrence analysis to identify the relationships among different entities (e.g., persons, vehicles, locations, and organizations) in criminal justice databases.
Other information technologies also have been used in law enforcement. For example, the Connect system introduced by the New York Police Department uses computer statistics and crime mapping techniques to identify the types of crimes happening in different districts. Data mining techniques have also been applied to identifying interesting patterns in criminal data. For example, a self-organizing map is used to cluster similar sexual offense cases into groups in order to identify serial offenders.
There are many monitoring and notification systems for Web information sources. One example is the NorthernLight Web search engine (www.northernlight.com), which alerts users when new Web pages are added to the database. Some client-side search tools, such as Copernic Agent (www.copernic.com) and WebSeeker (www.bluesquirrel.com), also provide the functionality for scheduling automatic searches. Eirade (www.etrade.com) allows users to choose which stocks they want to monitor and the users are alerted when the stock price reaches the level they specified. In the financial application arena, more advanced monitoring (e.g., monitoring based on the results of complex financial analysis) has also been proposed. In these systems, users can often opt to be alerted in different ways, such as Web messages, emails, pagers, voice messages, or short messages for mobile devices. In the area of providing monitoring and alerting support for law enforcement applications, the FALCON system developed at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) in Charlotte, N.C. offers the functionality of monitoring all incoming police records as well as sending alert messages to police offers by email and pager. FALCON does not offer collaborative filtering capabilities or advanced collaboration functions.
Collaborative filtering is a kind of collaboration in which people help one another perform filtering by recording their reactions to documents they read. Examples of collaborative filtering and recommender systems include Amazon.com, GroupLens, Fab, Ringo, Do-I-Care, and Collaborative Spider. When a user performs a search, these systems will recommend a set of documents or items that may be of interest based on this user's profile and other users' interests and past actions.
New technologies providing even more information are showing up all the time. An example is a device that shoots a small GPS-equipped dart that attaches itself to a suspect's vehicle during a high-speed pursuit. Another is an ear-mounted video camera that captures an officers' view of traffic stops and other incidents. Police departments are using cameras on patrol cars to scan and track the license plates of each vehicle they pass, which lets them recoup overdue parking violations fines.
Law enforcement technology may be evolving, but it hasn't changed the core responsibilities of police officers' jobs; police officers still must talk to people and gather information. Judgment and instinct from officers is the most important when recording what is actionable. When an officer is given information, they are responsible to act on it or not, which can lead to misconduct.
Two types of intelligence are used:                Tactical intelligence is used in the development of a criminal case that usually is a continuing criminal enterprise, a major multijurisdictional crime, or other form of complex criminal investigation, such as terrorism. It seeks to gather and manage diverse information to facilitate a successful prosecution of the intelligence target. It is also used for specific decision making or problem solving to deal with an immediate situation or crisis.        Strategic intelligence examines crime patterns and crime trends for management use in decision making, resource development, resource allocation, and policy planning. While similar to crime analysis, strategic intelligence typically focuses on specific crime types, such as criminal enterprises, drug traffickers, terrorists, or other forms of complex criminality. It also provides detailed information on a specified type of crime or criminality.        
The different forms of intelligence can guide investigations, provide insights for resource allocation, suggest when priorities should be expanded or changed, suggest when new training and procedures may be needed to address changing threats and permit insight when there is a change in the threat level.
Intelligence-led policing (ILP) is a policing model that has emerged in recent years which is built around risk assessment and risk management. Although there is no universally accepted understanding of what intelligence-led policing entails, the leading definition is that ILP is a strategic, future-oriented and targeted approach to crime control, focusing upon the identification, analysis and ‘management’ of persisting and developing ‘problems’ or ‘risks.’ In simpler terms, it is a model of policing in which intelligence serves as a guide to operations, rather than the reverse.
Unlike industries where information overload can be resolved with hardware and storage policies, the emergency service field must account for a daily bombardment of information that might or might not be relevant the moment it is received. Zipping up this information and shipping it off to some forgotten archive is not an option, especially when considering that case activity is constantly in flux. It takes full time personnel and large/expensive meetings devoted to creating actionable information with no good way to disseminate it.
Intelligence data often resides across multiple locations, making retrieval and analysis even more cumbersome. At the end of the day, analysts require speed, efficiency and 100-percent accuracy when it comes to the software tools they use to carry out their intelligence work. The information should be kept permanently and be stored in doubles or triples.
There are four key needs in emergency services:                Operational Awareness: Supporting a comprehensive, relevant view into activities        Information Integration and Analysis: managing data effectively and reducing information overload        Strategic and Tactical Planning: creating more opportunities for proactive policing through analytic tools        Field Mobility: providing a platform for data and information exchange into and out of the field        
It is also important that these follow standard operating procedures.
Increasing numbers of emergency service workers are using sophisticated hardware, including smart phones and smart devices that plug into computers (for example fingerprint analyzers) and radios. Because of the range in age of workers, the equipment has to be easy to use and learn. With unlimited mobile data on tap, all manner of information can be pushed to workers who might previously have had to spend time returning to the station to receive it. It also serves as a quick storage medium for things like photos of suspects, or new methods of performing a procedure.
The use of mobile technology is associated with an increasing amount of information at the users disposal. The twin themes of a growing volume of information and increasing exposure to it is called information overload. Information overload results from the inability of living systems to process excessive amounts of information. Combined with the fact that technology can generate information much faster than people can process it, this means that people often find themselves unable to cope with an increasing amount of information. Information overload may originate from information actively requested or searched for and information received whether or not the recipient wants/needs it or not.
In emergency service organizations, a great deal of information flows to and from internal departments and external organizations, and the regulatory framework requires substantial audit trails and documentation. The structure is one of command and control, with hierarchical relationships involving reporting up and down the ranks. These factors (and others) result in a large volume of information for managers to deal with.
Organizational information includes systems and services that are designed to acquire, share and disseminate information of all kinds, including information that circulates through formal and informal means, both internally and externally. The information environment and organizational context needs to be understood in order to understand the complex ways in which information flows in, out and around the organization, and how this contributes towards information overload, and to judge the effectiveness of the information, style, etc.
Emergency service organizations operate in a complex and changing environment, with information flowing to and from external organizations, as well as through a number of internal hierarchies and departments. The highly structured organization tends to generate highly structured and often large amounts of information. Time pressure, frequent deadlines, complex tasks, high uncertainty, unpredictable events and important decision consequences also contribute towards information load.
As the culture of an organization moves towards a more open information environment, with information being shared more freely and widely, this results in a greater volume of information being made available to the individual, and decision making power being pushed out. Superiors can try to summarize information on their behalf. This serves to moderate information overload by reducing the time spent on information seeking or filtering. To avoid information overload, individuals employ process or coping strategies, which may be either conscious or unconscious and can potentially become dysfunctional. Filtering, omission and error are among the coping strategies.
Effective real-time business intelligence requires that data latency, analysis latency, and action latency be reduced as much as possible. The analysis of large amounts of historical data prior to taking action inherently involves considerable latency.
Among the problems experienced by emergency workers are the following:                Too much information        Lack ability to present information relevant to each workers needs to their current context        Information and knowledge management        Integration of multiple systems, each having different functionalities and ontology's and data fragmented with lack of interoperability between systems, internal groups and departments        Expecting workers to query different distributed data sources, including both internal databases as well as external ones managed by other agencies, often using different hardware platforms, database systems, network protocols, data schemes, ontology's and user interfaces        Rapid and continuing advancement of information technologies        Data is sent in different ways: radio, email, dispatch, etc.        Data is input into the different systems by different people in different ways        The dynamic nature of data sources; for example in police services, many cases involve long periods of investigation, and the data can be updated frequently        Personnel with different job functions and working at different locations can easily acquire a vast amount of knowledge about a particular topic; the ability to share knowledge in a collaborative environment by linking together people who are working on the same or similar cases        No automatic information monitoring or information sharing among users        Having situational awareness, and once a worker has it for their area, there is no way to pass it on        Not leveraging full power of Next Gen Mobility devices        Daily briefings are largely a manual process and are very static, there is no tracking of what is shared and no standard notation between presenters        Collaboration & Communication take place over traditional channels—often inefficient        New technologies emerging that have new interfaces and provide even more information that needs to be integrated and filtered        In general, information stored or gathered is easy to report or track, but when, who, and how they accessed is not.        Old information needs to be purged.        